Empty Storefronts, Endless Possibilities
Announcing LETS Studio's placemaking initiative in Oakland.
I promised myself that I would try to publish something on a monthly cadence, so here we are! The last post was June 18th, so I’m not too far off… will be more on top of it next time.
Since then, I’ve mostly been getting LETS’ new empty storefronts initiative off the ground (the main topic of this month’s installment). A lot of that has been getting familiar with the challenges that Oakland-based small businesses have faced in sustaining their operations through numerous changing winds: increasing rents, lower foot traffic, shifting administrations, and of course, a global pandemic. Along the way, I’ve learned from organizers at fighting for a more restorative local economy, the former president of Oakland’s Indie Alliance, and the stories of many small business owners. The process of learning and engaging the community has been humbling and exciting, whether scrounging through economic data, learning to use OpenStreetMap, or fiddling with poster designs.
You can read more about all of this below. Even if you don’t read the below update in full, I would really appreciate 1) a free subscription if you haven’t already subscribed, and 2) a share to someone you think would really enjoy my work on inclusive urban design and policymaking!
Small businesses in Oakland have directly suffered as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic. According to the city’s economic health dashboard, the retail vacancy rate in downtown Oakland has tripled in the past few years, from 2.5% in 2019 to 7.5% in 2023 (the most recent count). Small local business struggled in Oakland even before the pandemic, citing high commercial rents, responses to property damage and public safety incidents, and cleanliness as important challenges to their sustainability.
The city (both government and community) hasn’t taken the issue sitting down, either. Since then, numerous collectives have organized themselves to meet the moment, advocating to city government to provide and preserve essential resources. The REAL People’s Organizing Collective successfully preserved funding for community ambassadors in the last few years (and recently won an increase to that investment in the recent mid-cycle budget). The city’s Economic & Workforce Development Department produced an economic recovery plan derived from the recommendations of many small business advocates, including the provision of emergency rent relief and priority in city contracting and grantmaking. They have also produced reports highlighting the racial and class-based disparities in who can access capital for businesses, as well as strategies for redressing this harm.
Even though the focal point of our analysis is on small businesses, the impact is much broader than that; investing in small local businesses creates more opportunities for a city’s culture to flourish while also creating ladders to economic stability. Approximately 80% of jobs in Oakland are provided by businesses with fewer than 50 employees, highlighting small business’ importance to the economic resilience of the city. Research from the Institute for Local Self-Reliance indicate significantly more money spent on these businesses circulates locally (as opposed to being captured by larger, even transnational corporate interests). Altogether, small businesses can be the vehicle through which “complete communities” – neighborhoods in which most basic needs no more than a 15 minute walk away – can be realized, granting greater social and physical health to everyone who lives here.
By filling these empty storefronts and keeping them filled, we believe that there are bountiful opportunities for Oakland’s streets to become livelier and more convenient. This can be done in a way that brings greater economic stability to more members of our community while also filling more of the community’s basic needs (like for fresh produce, social services, and cultural supports). And with more people out and about walking in their neighborhoods to access their everyday needs and building relationships with the people around them, neighborhoods can even become safer.
So for this particular initiative, our guiding research questions are as follows:
What kind of resources, social spaces, cultural spaces, and more do we want in this neighborhood?
What policies & services would help local entrepreneurs to not only fill these spaces, but to thrive in the long term?
As with any research project, it’s likely that we’ll learn more that improves the framing of these questions, and maybe even prioritize new questions as we go along. But with this as a starting point, we hope we’ll identify not only problems, but solutions to the ongoing challenges that our community is facing.
A Community-Centered Approach
For us, the story of our particular block of downtown Oakland speaks well to both the struggles and successes of small businesses in Oakland. 14th Street is a central artery of the downtown Oakland; along its broad expanse lie many businesses new and old, city hall, the main branch of the Oakland Public Library, a historic community arts center, and even Lake Merritt at its far end. In the years just before the pandemic struck, Even now, 14th Street is mentioned often in the city government’s plans for securing a brighter future for downtown, as interpreted in the recently-adopted Downtown Oakland Specific Plan; it is the site of a community development corporation, as well as a major project to make the streets safer for pedestrians and bikers (now in construction).
Nowadays, our particular corner isn’t the most active or inspiring. While well-known favorites like Maya Halal Taqueria still draw the attention of residents and workers in the area, one in four of the storefronts in the area are closed – much higher than the 7% retail vacancy rate most recently reported by the city. Everyday foot traffic is meager relative to the size of the storefronts and the streets, and without consistent patronage, many business owners are struggling to make their operations pencil out financially. Instances of gun violence have led to the shuttering of more than one of the nearby bars. Over a quarter of what street space might have otherwise been housing or retail space is currently taken up by parking lots.
To make this issue really concrete, we mapped the status of every storefront on our block. As I walked around the block, it was fairly obvious which businesses were closed via the usual telltale signs: boarded up doors plastered with graffiti, a for sale or for lease sign out front, or seemingly discarded inventory. After working on the block for a few months now, I’ve also started to figure out which storefronts never seem to have anyone in them, making me fairly confident in marking them as “vacant”. On more than one occasion, a curious shopkeeper or restauranteur gave me extra tips as to which storefronts they believed to be vacant, or corrected my assumptions (thank you, Jessica!). All of this information – the addresses of each storefront, the names of active businesses, the vacancy status – made it into a simple spreadsheet and later a more intuitive map seen below. (As a bonus, I updated OpenStreetMap, an open-source mapping project that powers many other services including Amazon’s maps, as I went along.)
There’s definitely something special to learn by starting our investigation right where we live and work. As I’ve found out, it’s much easier to start by studying and engaging something when you can just walk outside and talk to the very people and places that you’re interested in – much easier than if I were to try to do that for the entirety of downtown! Understanding the thousands of businesses and residents that call downtown their home base is difficult to do beyond (somewhat impersonal) data-driven approaches, but by limiting the scope to just our block, that “information” can become much more real and nuanced. Data is then no longer just sterile information, but is infused with a more emotional experiences. I think this is a principled initial approach that I think policy designers can adopt more often in the early stages of their work; we all stand so much to gain simply by being building relationships with our neighbors and making sense of the conditions that we live through each day.
To that end, we’ll be kicking off our research with a miniature study of our entire block and the diversity of experiences, needs, and desires contained within it. We want to directly talk to the small business owners on our block more about what it was like to get their businesses started, and what they’re struggling most with today. We’ll just as readily gather information from the residents and workers who stroll these streets everyday to learn what amenities they believe are missing and could help – things like social services, cultural centers, grocery stores, and more that are already evidently missing on a 15 minute walk through downtown. It’s going to be a lot more mapping, interviews, and surveys that altogether give us a better understanding of what our corner of the city needs to thrive. Through all of this, we’ll be looking for the stories that need to be elevated and what the people really want to know to improve their lives.
Something I’m trying to be very intentional about is creating accessible opportunities for our neighbors (and the city at large) to take part in the conversation. Our Instagram feed (@lets.studiooo), mobile subscription (text “JOIN” to (833) 202-9543), and website will be updated on a regular basis with updates on what we’ve learned on the street. By the end of September, we’ll aim to host a short series of conversations in the neighborhood (both at the Oakland Lowdown’s space and in partnership with nearby community spaces) and online to process what we’ve learned as a community, and figure out how we can move forward to make our block better. If you’re walking around near our block downtown, keep an eye out for our posters – they have a QR code and other information to help you follow along!
Expanding the Conversation
While our block does a good job of highlighting the issue and its importance, we already know we’ll want to expand the conversation to make the insights useful and valid for city policymaking. What applies to a single block might not be fully representative of all of downtown Oakland, and while it’s still true that policy interventions should ideally be tailored to the needs and circumstances of different populations, engaging the rest of downtown Oakland in our research will help to give us more confidence that what we learned is actually applicable across many different streets and blocks in the area. To that end, we’ll eventually start to conduct more interviews with small business owners across different commercial corridors downtown, as well as host opportunities for residents across the neighborhood to lend their perspectives.
Expanding the conversation also means dealing more seriously with the conflicts that arise between residents, business owners, and property owners. These interests are not always aligned; property owners might want to keep rents high to pay off their debts at the opposition of the businesses, I’m particularly excited about the space that this gives for more deliberative methods of engagement that encourage community members to thoughtfully converse with each other and arrive at consensus about which issues most important to the community, how they might move forward, etc. While not all conflicts can be resolved, these kinds of conversations can help to make the real source of conflicts known and potentially highlight win-win scenarios that might otherwise be difficult to find.
The same spirit of participatory research and design will follow us at that stage, driven through more community partnerships. Coalitions are often crucial community-driven development, as different organizations collectively have deeper connections throughout the city and can build a more thorough, practical understanding of an issue. These community-based organizations are also able to bring community members to the table that we frankly wouldn’t have the trust or relationships to bring ourselves. We’ve already talked to representatives from the Oakland Indie Alliance, Restore Oakland, The Greenlining Institute, the Sanctuary for Sustainable Artistry, and more who have been enormously helpful in validating our understanding of the issues that small businesses face. By bringing organizations like these in conversation with others that support equitable development, we hope to make these insights genuinely useful to the changemakers in our community.
With hope, the needs we identify and the policy options that we explore can actually help advance the city’s goals around economic development as well. In nearby San Francisco, the Vacant to Vibrant program was run by SF New Deal, and has successfully placed artisans, food pop-ups, and others in vacant commercial spaces in the downtown core. Here in Oakland, there’s already some momentum for bringing community ambassadors to more commercial corridors, addressing the issue of vacant storefronts, and generally revitalizing downtown (via the Downtown Specific Plan). My hope is that by proactively building the capacity within the community to reflect and understand these issues, we can create a policy agenda that is more targeted to their needs, and implement those policies in direct partnership with the community as well.
In the simplest sense, I’m just trying to get people to talk to each other about the issues they’re facing as a community. It sounds trivial sometimes, but honestly, there aren’t many places where people can do that in a way that both builds relationships and contributes new knowledge to the situation. I think that’s the foundation of a healthy and functional local democracy, and that’s why I’m doing this work.
I’ll be posting more about the journey in this newsletter, along with other thoughts on community development, urban design, participatory democracy, and more. If email newsletters aren’t your thing, follow @lets.studiooo on Instagram and I’ll bother you there. If you really love this, do both and share it with someone who you think would love it too. :)